In order to lower the manufacturing cost in the mass production of electrical equipment, particularly home electronic goods such as television receivers and video tape recorders (VCR), automated assembly machines such as robots have been introduced. As a result, automated supply, assembly, and flow soldering operations dealing not only with active electronic components such as semiconductor devices but also with passive components such as resistors and condensers held by carrier tape have become commonplace.
In such electrical equipment, a great number of electric connectors are utilized to provide for easy connection and release of ribbon cable or flexible circuit connections boards with printed circuit boards, or for reciprocal connections between circuit boards, or for connections with other devices (such as CRTs, switches, motors, etc.). (For example, see Patent Report No. 59-114776 or Utility Report No. 62-57383.)
However, no carrier tape type electrical connector existed to make possible the automated mounting of high density packaging devices with a large number of pins. The reason for this is that, hitherto, electrical connectors, unlike the above noted resistors etc., did not have two or more lead lines so that they could be secured to a tape. Furthermore, the terminals and contact points of previous electrical connectors were often of one unit, usually punched out of flexible metal sheets. The option of using a tape carrier with such electrical connectors presents functional and manufacturing cost problems.
Consequently, it was necessary to develop a tape carrier type electrical connector to make automated machine assembly possible, just as was being done with other active and passive electronic components.